Woodlawn Friends Meeting House Cemetery is located behind the meeting house at the intersection of Woodlawn Road and Richmond Highway (U.S. Route 1). The meeting house faces Woodlawn Road and is in a small stand of trees. The building sits away from both thoroughfares, almost unnoticed at the busy intersection. The meeting house and cemetery are situated on just over two acres of land which was once the Dogue Run Farm on George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, according to a 1969 Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory. Washington presented the property to his step granddaughter and ward, Eleanor Parke Custis and her husband Lawrence Lewis (Washington's nephew) as a wedding gift. The Lewises named their home "Woodlawn Plantation." The house stands nearby and is open to the public.



The Lewis estate sold the land in 1848 to Troth & Gillingham, an organization of Quakers who planned to "divide the land into small farms and work them with free labor," according to the inventory. In about 1850, Chalkley Gillingham donated a portion of his land to the Society of Friends for use as a meeting place, a transaction formalized by an 1857 deed. The meeting house, built in 1853, is beautifully preserved. The building and cemetery are surrounded by trees and shrubs and old oaks shade the area. Graffiti scratched into the clapboard by Union soldiers camping at the site during the Civil War has been preserved on the front porch: "1st Mich. Cav.; W. Long Manuyunk, Pa.; A. W., Hepburn, Pa.…"



Most of the Quaker land was taken by the government when the military base Camp A. A. Humphreys was established on the west side of Woodlawn Road during World War I. The meeting house survived, but is now completely surrounded by the base which was renamed Fort Belvoir in the 1930s.



About 50 yards into the woods on the west side of the cemetery is a large mound containing several gravestones and gravestone fragements which have been respectfully arranged, with four gravestones standing upright in the mound and other gravestones and fragments embedded around the sides of the mound. These gravestones had been brought to this site from the Quaker Burying Ground in the City of Alexandria in 1992, as that cemetery was displaced by the construction of the main branch of the Alexandria Public Library.



Fairfax County Cemetery Survey Number: FX138; Virginia State Archaeological Number: 44FX1211